Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to communication networks and, more particularly, to combining information from multiple nodes in a communication network.
Description of the Related Art
Large computations sometimes need to be performed by distributing the computation over multiple processing devices and combining the results using information exchanged over a network. For example, data mining operations may require multiplying two matrices that are too large to be stored in the memory of a single processing device. Portions of the matrix multiplication may therefore be performed in different processing devices (e.g. at source nodes) and the results may be combined by another set of processing devices (e.g., at destination nodes) to produce the final result of the matrix multiplication. For another example, results of measurements performed by sensors in a sensor network may need to be combined or added at other nodes in the sensor network. The conventional approach is to transmit information from the source nodes to the destination nodes over communication links (e.g., edges) in the network. The destination nodes may then combine the results to produce the desired output. However, the overhead required to transmit all of the individual results over the edges of the network may severely tax the resources of the network. For example, a significant portion (or all) of the bandwidth of the communication links may be consumed by transmitting the information produced at the source nodes to the destination nodes, which may result in lags, transmission failures, inefficient power consumption, and the like.